Making maps in Excel

Update, September 9th, 2011: The images are gone since I'm deleting everything off of my photobucket account - I like imgur far better. I'm lazy, and thus haven't uploaded the images to imgur. Please let me know if you require the images, and I'll upload them again at that point.

A fellow Weaver has asked me to make a guide for him to make maps in Excel. Alright, perhaps not in so many words, but I might as well make a long, complex guide.

Note that these are only my preferences, and that many a step could be changed to suit your own likings. Things which are my own preference, they will be in blue and bolded. Sometimes, if all of the parts of a step are personal preference, it will be denoted with ==OPTIONAL==. In this case, none of the text within will be blue or bolded; it will be assumed to be.
All parameters are also personal preferences, but for your sanity, I will not make blue or bold them.
Note that this is assumed you are using a Windows computer.

OpenOffice Calc
Paint, Paint.net, Fireworks, GIMP, or some other image editing software. If you just post the .xls for your players, you can skip this step, but generally, it's more player-friendly to do it this way.
An account with Photobucket, Flickr, or some other photo hosting website. Again, not needed if you're posting the .xls.

Setting Up

Open Excel. This should be fairly rudimentary, but, if I'm going to make this extensive, I might as well add this. Note that each step will be accompanied with a screenshot of the step.

Press Ctrl-A, or in other words, select all. This is also doable by clicking the button in the upper-left, where no cell is to the left of, or below.

Go to the space between columns A and B, and drag it until the cell width is 100 pixels. I'm sure there's a manual way to do this, but I don't know it if there is one.

Do step 3, except between rows 1 and 2.

While still having all cells selected, press Ctrl-1 (Edit Cells), put all cells to wrap text, Times New Roman font, font size 14. This is only used if you're writing a key or something.

Making The Map

Let's say you're going to make a small room, a 5x5 with a 1x3 hallway leading in.
Start by selecting the 'main room' area. Then, press Ctrl-1. I generally leave the 'A' column and row 1 empty, and have the upperleftmost block B2. Note that my zoom is now 75%, to accommodate the room.

Now, move to the tab called border. I use the thickest line, the choice second to the bottom on the left column. Click the outline button. Then click 'Okay'.

When adding halls, do the same as if it were another room. However, once that is done, find the square with the irritating line between connection of hallway and room, click it, and press Ctrl-1. Go to the borders tab once again. This time, instead of click 'Outline', find the offending side which separates hallway and room, and click it. It should disappear. The screenshot skips past the hallway-making, and to the personal preference part.

Find the squares around the room, assuming they are walls, and select them. You can click and drag to select a group, and hold control while clicking to add to a current group. Then, go to the paint can on the toolbar on the top, click it, and find grey 50%. Click that.

Making Objects And People

For this, I'll make a table, a monster, an NPC, and a player.

Find your insert tab/filemenu. Click on basic shapes, then the rectangle. Position your pointer directly over the corner between four squares, click, and drag to make the desired size. I'll make a 1x2 on the corner. It may help to label things. Labeling can be found a few steps from now. Then, click the shape, then the paint can, and then brown.

Again, find your insert tab/filemenu. Click on basic shapes, then the circle. I'll be making a human rogue, so I'll make the diameter a square's width. I'll be coloring it red, since it's an enemy.

Making a wizard player (blue), and NPC fighter (green). If you want to make all the medium characters the same size, you can just click the red circle, press Ctrl-C, move to another location, click another square where you want to place the circle, and press Ctrl-V. This saves me a great deal of time.

To make a label, first, find a text box. It'll be under the insert tab too. If you are using OpenOffice, you can just double click the shape, I'm pretty sure. If you are, you can skip these next few sentences. Drag the text box to make the circle encircle the box.

[b][color=blue]Change the text size, font, and positioning to what you like. I generally use Times New Roman centered. The font size depends on the name; I use whatever fits the best. These buttons should be found on the main toolbar. I've named the rogue Rogue. I'm low on creativity today. So sue me. Then, with the box still selected, click the paint can, and click the no fill option. Once that is done, hold control down and click the circle beneath the text box. Right click somewhere on the circle, and from the resulting menu, go to the 'Group' sub-menu, and click group. Then, repeat with any other tokens. You can apply this same procedure to label other things. Note, if you want to make the token with an image, skip the whole text box thing, and just click the paint can, click more colors, and you *should* get a menu from which you can upload an image to display. There may be some other procedure, but I think that should be it.

Posting The Map

This should be easy enough. With whichever part of the map you wish to post, be sure that's on the screen. Zoom in/out if needed. Press print screen. Open up your image editing program, and press Ctrl-V. Save it. Since I only use photobucket, I cannot provide an explanation for other image hosting services. I won't be providing an explanation for any of them. Once you get the image uploaded, however, find the [img] code, copy that, and paste it into the post you wish it to accompany. I generally put these in [spoiler=Map] [/spoiler] boxes.

Underneath the post you wish the file to accompany, scroll down to 'Upload File'. It should be downhill from there.

Also, there's a similiar technique you can use if you want an ascii map, just put all the characters you one into their cells, save it as a UTF-16 (.txt) file. Then go in your .txt file, run a "find and replace all" on the tab characters, replace them with spaces, and now you have a nice mono-spaced file that you can copy-and-paste the map into code blocks on myth-weavers.

I've been using paint.NET which is a free, open source, photo editing software (similar to photoshop) and could not be happier with it so far.
I'm a fan of randomly generated anything (dungeons, treasure, magical items, so on and so forth) so I don't show favoritism. What I've found to be most efficient so far is using myth-weavers random dungeon generator along with paint.NET to add in a few details. I run a D&D 3.5E game and in the back of the Dungeon Masters guide there are some pictures of walls, floors, alters, coins and the like that DO have permission to be photocopied and used.
First I randomly generate a dungeon, then copy and paste that into paint.NET
Scan in an example of a set of floor tiles out of the DM's guide
copy and paste that onto the floor plan
Do the same for walls
Add in icons for PC's and enemies and voila.
If you're familiar with using layers you can make a pretty mean looking map.

I've seen some totally awesome looking maps out there, but I like the way mine have gone so far because it's quick, easy to use, and I can make changes without having to redo anything.
I've got no problem with writing a TUT is anyone is interested in the finer details.

Example:

Numbed Icons are enemies, dashed arrows indicate the direction it SOUNDS like they're moving. Lettered tokens are the first initial of the PC's involved.

EDIT: Just now noticed this topic was just for making maps in EXCEL. My bad.